Brazil (film, 1985)

See also: Brazil (homonymy)

Brazil is a British film carried out by Terry Gilliam, left on the screens in 1985.

Data sheet

  • original Title: Brazil

  • Original music: Michael Kamen

  • additional Music: Kate Bush (song Sam Lowry' S 1st Dream )
  • Director of the photography: Roger Pratt
  • Decorations: Norman Garwood
  • Costumes: James Acheson
  • Assembly: Julian Doyle
  • Film British
  • Lasted: according to the versions, 131 minutes (most current), 142 minutes (director' S cut) or 94 minutes
  • Format: Colors (Technicolor) - 1,37:1 or 1,85:1 - Super 35mm - Dolby SRD
  • Comings out date:
  • Kinds: comedy, drama, science fiction, fantastic

Distribution

Comments

Regarded as a Film worship by the fans of Terry Gilliam, old Monty Python, Brazil is a black film, swarming with details, describing a dark and oppressive universe which one finds of others of his films such Bandits, gangsters , Jabberwocky or the Army of the 12 monkeys .

As opposed to what its title lets suppose, the film does not show a direct link and explicit with the Brésil.

It was inspired by the book 1984 of George Orwell. Work of Orwell, one finds the dictatorial aspect of a “bureaucratic empire” in which Sam Lowry, main character, work and seek to melt themselves in the mass, in particular by refusing a promotion. Thereafter, while being confronted more and more with reality (what results in the realism and the increasingly exacerbated brutality of its dreams) it will follow the trace of the woman who haunts it and who will prove to be a more or less unsubdued and disrespectful character; it is this search of the reality which will move away it from the illusory bureaucratic ambition and will oppose to him a retreat and awakening in the discovery of simple and fundamental things. All these elements are found in 1984 although the screen and of the elements of the universe created, differ. The general atmosphere which emerges from the film which often lends to smiling by the nonsense of the shown situations and the play of the actors (see for example the first intervention of the plumbers of the Central services, or the intervention of Harry Tuttle) is however very different from that of the book.

The Brazil film also approaches the problems of the individual responsibility in collective hysteria like the bureaucratic dictatorship described in film. When, for example, the best friend of the main character, is charged to proceed to the torture of the latter by releasing terrible “a to him does not make the things more complicated than than they are ”. This topic was also approached in 1984 . See also on this subject the Experiment of Milgram.

As well as the majority of films of Terry Gilliam, Brazil finally intends to treat, by a richness of tons sometimes destabilizing (mixing poetry and cynicism, epism and absurd humor), of the intimacy of the relationship between the dream and the reality, put here forward by that of the individual with the system. This is why It is also possible to bring Brazil closer to the " Lawsuit " of Kafka (in particular by the progressive nonsense of the situations opposing Sam Lowry to an Order seeming at the same time strange and terrifying), or " Don Quichotte " of Cervantes (particularly by the symbolism used at the time of the phases of oneiric combat of Sam Lowry, and more generally in its increasingly enthusiastic search of a dream lost in the middle of a world controlled by the rational one), work of which it will try an adaptation besides 15 years later.

The end of turning saw a conflict between Terry Gilliam and its producers, in particular Sidney Sheinberg at the time with the head of Universal, which leads to three versions different from film. The producers finding the end too dark, altered film with a fine happy (a happy end ) and a 94 minutes duration, it is Love conquers all . This version causes the anger of Terry Gilliam, which decides to work over again Brazil before its American exit in December 1985 and gives him one duration 132 minutes and the end that one knows. For Europe, it will leave a version 142 minutes.

The conflict is part from now on of the history of the cinema and is reported in documentary the The Battle off Brazil . Having a presentiment of that a legal step was dedicated to the failure, Terry Gilliam engages a true media battle during which it organized secret projections for the journalists, and bought a full page in Variety carrying the message simply:

“Dear Sid Sheinberg,
when are you going to
release my film “BRAZIL” ?
Terry Gilliam. ”
(“Dear Sid Sheinberg, when will you leave my film Brazil ? ” Gilliam exploits the double direction of release in English: at the same time to release and leave (a film)).

See too

  • Certaines scenes was turned in suburbs Parisienne, with Noisy Large the, in the complex of building the " Palacio d' Abraxas" realized by Ricardo Bofill in 1982. The scene of torture at the end of film is held in the center of the tower of cooling of a nuclear plant.
  • In the French version the sequence of the samurai is held in continuity in a long sequence a contrario of the American version divided into three distinct parts. The samurai is a reference, an indirect homage to Akira Kurosawa, one of the Masters of Gilliam, and also an ironic wink with the high technology which often comes from Japan.

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